Finders, keepers: Collecting sciences and collecting practice

History of Science

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 428-454

  Kohler, Robert E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 37149012555     PISSN: 00732753     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/007327530704500403     Document Type: Article

References (139)

1. On the field sciences see Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler (eds), "Science in the field", Osiris, n.s., xi (1996);
2. and Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (eds), Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, 1996).
3. Also Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and labscapes: Exploring the lab-field border in biology (Chicago, 2002).
4. Adrian Johns, "Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society", in Reading, society, and politics in early modern England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (New York, 2003), 244-71;
5. and James A. Secord, "Knowledge in transit", Isis, xcv (2004), 654-72.
6. Martin Rudwick, review of Simon J. Knell, The culture of English geology, 1815-1851 (Aldershot, 2000), in The Times Literary Supplement, 4 May 2001, 27.
7. Anke te Heesen and Emma C. Spary (eds), Sammeln als Wissen: Das Sammeln und seine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung (Göttingen, 2001).
8. We may also undervalue collecting because, unlike experimenting, it is not socially exclusive and can be recreational. We thus associate collecting with unskilled labour or vacationing.
9. Te Heesen and Spary, Sammeln als Wissen (ref. 4);
10. and Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1994).
11. Also Susan A. Crane, Collecting and historical consciousness in early nineteenth-century Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2000);
12. and Marco Beretta (ed.), From private to public: Natural collections and museums (Sagamore Beach, MA, 2005).
13. Useful points of entry are Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds), The origins of museums: The cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (New York, 1985);
14. Ludwig Duncker, "Die Kultur des Sammelns und ihre pädagogische Bedeutung", Neue Sammlung, xxx (1990), 450-65;
15. and (despite its lack of a bibliography!) Ingo Herklotz, "Neue Literatur zur Sammlungsgeschichte", Kunstchronik, xlvii (1994), 117-35.
16. Recent works include Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800 (London, 1990; translated from the original French edn, Paris, 1987);
17. Christoph Becker, Vom Raritäten-Kabinett zur Sammlung als Institution: Sammeln und Ordnen in Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Engelsbach, 1996);
18. and Andreas Grote (ed.), Macrocosmos in Microcosmo - Die Welt in der Stube: Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450 bis 1800 (Opladen, 1994).
19. For example: Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (New York, 1986);
20. Daniel Miller (ed.), Material cultures: Why some things matter (Chicago, 1998);
21. Christopher Tilly (ed.), Reading material culture (Oxford, 1990);
22. Chandra Mukerji, From graven images: Patterns of modern materialism (New York, 1983);
23. and John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993).
24. For example: Carla Yanni, Nature's museums: Victorian science and the architecture of display (Baltimore, MD, 2000);
25. Sophie Forgan, "The architecture of display: Museums, universities, and objects in nineteenth-century Britain", History of science, xxxii (1994), 139-62;
26. Ivan Karp, Steven D. Lavine, and Christine M. Kreamer (eds), Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display (Washington, DC, 1991);
27. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, objects, and collections: A cultural study (Washington, DC, 1992);
28. and Sharon MacDonald (ed.), The politics of display: Museums, science, culture (London, 1998).
29. Good bibliographical guides to this growing literature are the essays by Samuel Alberti, Jim Bennett, Sophie Forgan, and Sally G. Kohlstedt in "Focus: Museums and the history of science", Isis, xcvi (2006), 559-608.
30. The most celebrated analysis of the politics of display is Donna Harraway, "Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-30", in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science (New York, 1989), 26-58;
31. but see also Michael Schudson, "Paper tigers: A sociologist follows cultural studies into the wilderness", Lingua Franca, vii/6 (Aug. 1997), 49-56.
32. Karen Wonders, Habitat dioramas: Illusions of wilderness in museums of natural history (Stockholm, 1993);
33. and Gordon McOuat, "Kinds, patronage and commodities: How the British Museum went from collecting (and exchanging) patronage to collecting (and exchanging) commodities and what that might say about natural objects" (unpublished essay, 2005). Museums' strategies of building collections varied, and a comparative history is much needed: Lynn K. Nyhart and Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr, personal communications (on the Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg museums).
34. Robert E. Kohler, All creatures: Naturalists, collectors, and biodiversity, 1850-1950 (Princeton, 2006).
35. John V. Pickstone, Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology and medicine (Chicago, 2000);
36. and idem,
37. "Museological science? The place of the analytical / comparative in nineteenth-century science, technology and medicine", History of science, xxxii (1994), 111-38.
38. Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian science and the idea of a transcontinental nation (Toronto, 1987), esp. pp. 4-6, 8-9, 269-74.
39. Erin McLeary, "Science in a bottle: The medical museum in North America, 1850-1940", Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001, esp. chaps. 2-3.
40. Ursula Klein, "Shifting ontologies, changing classifications: Plant materials from 1700 to 1830", Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxxvi (2005), 261-329;
41. and eadem, Experiments, models, paper tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century (Stanford, 2003), chap. 5.
42. Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathyrn K. Sklar (eds), The social survey in historical perspective (New York, 1991);
43. and David Matless, "Regional surveys and local knowledges: The geographical imagination in Britain, 1918-239", Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xvii (1992), 464-80.
44. Mineralogical samples also now serve mainly as material for structural and chemical experiment.
45. For example: Susan M. Pearce, On collecting: An investigation into collecting in the European tradition (London, 1995);
46. eadem. Collecting in contemporary perspective (London, 1998);
47. John Eisner and Roger Cardinal, The culture of collecting (Cambridge, MA, 1994);
48. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting, an unruly passion: Psychological perspectives (Princeton, 1994);
49. and Susan Stewart, On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Baltimore, MD, 1984).
50. Knell, Culture of English geology (ref. 3);
51. idem,
52. "Collecting and excavation in palaeontology", and "Palaeontological excavation: Historical perspectives", Geological curator, vi/2 (1994), 49-56, 57-69.
53. Also Knell, "The roller-coaster of museum geology", in Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Exploring science in museums: New research in museum studies (London, 1996), 29-56.
54. Roy S. Porter, "Science, provincial culture and public opinion in Enlightenment England", The British journal for eighteenth-century studies, iii (1980), 20-46.
55. Arnold Thackray, "Natural knowledge in cultural context: The Manchester model", American historical review, lxxix (1974), 672-709.
56. For example: Uri Lanham, The bone hunters: The heroic age of paleontology in the American West (New York, 1973);
57. Edwin H. Colbert, Men and dinosaurs: The search infield and laboratory (New York, 1968);
58. and Tom Rea, Bone wars: The excavation and celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's dinosaur (Pittsburgh, 2001).
59. Lanham, Bone hunters (ref. 23) (on field sites);
60. Ronald Rainger, "Collectors and entrepreneurs: Hatcher, Wortman, and the structure of American vertebrate paleontology circa 1900", Earth sciences history, ix (1990), 14-21;
61. and P. J. Whybrow, "A history of fossil collecting and preparation techniques", Curator, xxviii (1985), 5-26.
62. Jeremy Vetter, "Cowboys, scientists, and fossils: Field work and local collaboration in the American West", unpublished paper, 2006; and idem, "The regional development of science: Knowledge, environment, and field work in the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains, 1860-1920", Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
63. Kohler, All creatures (ref. 12).
64. The idea of residential and cosmopolitan knowledge is developed ibid., esp. pp. 156-62.
65. The following is drawn from Kohler, All creatures (ref. 12), chap. 2;
66. Wonders, Habitat dioramas (ref. 11);
67. and Cindy Aron, Working at play: A history of vacations in the United States (New York, 1999).
68. Kohler, All creatures (ref. 12), 4-7.
69. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and nation (Cambridge, MA, 1999);
70. Staffan Müller-Wille, Botanik und weltweiter Handel: Zur Begründung eines Natürlichen Systems der Pflanzen durch Carl von Linné (1707-1778) (Berlin, 1999);
71. Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the exotic, and the science of French colonialism (Bloomington, IN, 1994);
72. and idem,
73. "Acclimatizing the world: A history of the paradigmatic colonial 'science'", Osiris, n.s., xv (2001), 135-51.
74. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of empire: Lives, culture, and conquest in the East, 1650-1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
75. David E. Allen, The naturalist in Britain: A social history (London, 1976; repr. Princeton, 1994). There is no comparable survey of recreational naturalizing in other countries;
76. but see Denise Phillips, "Friends of nature: Urban sociability and regional natural history in Dresden, 1800-1850", Osiris, n.s., xviii (2003), 43-59.
77. Anne L. Larsen, "Not since Noah: The English scientific zoologists and the craft of collecting, 1800-1840", Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1993.
78. On collector networks see also Daniel Goldstein, '"Yours for science': The Smithsonian Institution's correspondents and the shape of scientific community in nineteenth-century America", Isis, lxxxv (1994), 573-99.
79. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, "Amateurs and professionals in one country: Biology and natural history in late Victorian Yorkshire", Journal of the history of biology, xxxiv (2001), 115-47.
80. Anne Secord, "Science in the pub: Artisan botanists in early nineteenth-century Lancashire", History of science, xxxii (1994), 269-315.
81. Douglas Cole, Captured heritage: The scramble for Northwest Coast artifacts (Seattle, 1985).
82. On frontier mediators in general see Richard White, The middle ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991);
83. and James H. Merrell, Into the American woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania frontier (New York, 1999).
84. Cole, Captured heritage (ret'. 36), 106-9.
85. Kohler, All creatures (ref. 12), chap. 7.
86. For example: William C. Sturtevant, "Does anthropology need museums?", Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, lxxxii (1969), 619-49;
87. Nancy O. Lurie, "Museumland revisited", Human organization, xl (1981), 180-7;
88. and George W. Stocking, Jr (ed.), Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (Madison, WI, 1985).
89. Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles, Collecting colonialism: Material culture and colonial change (Oxford, 2001) (on New Guinea);
90. Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim (eds), The scramble for art in Central Africa (New York, 1998);
91. Jasanoff, Edge of empire (ref. 31) (on collecting in India and Egypt);
92. and Tom Griffiths, Hunters and collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (New York, 1996).
93. The best general history is still Glyn E. Daniel, A hundred years of archaeology (London, 1950);
94. a second edition, A hundred and fifty years of archaeology (London, 1975) brings the story to 1970.
95. Other useful points of entry include William H. Stiebing, Jr, Uncovering the past: A history of archaeology (Buffalo, NY, 1993);
96. Kenneth Hudson, A social history of archaeology: The British experience (London, 1981);
97. Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A history of American archaeology (London, 1974);
98. and Philippa Levine, The amateur and the professional: Antiquarians, historians, and archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (New York, 1986).
99. Glyn E. Daniel, The three ages: An essay on archaeological method (Cambridge, 1943);
100. Bo Gräslund, "Relative chronology: Dating methods in Scandinavian archaeology", Norwegian archaeological review, ix (1976), 69-126;
101. and idem. The birth of prehistoric chronology: Dating methods and dating systems in nineteenth-century Scandinavian archaeology (Cambridge, 1987).
102. See also Ole Klindt-Jensen, A history of Scandinavian archaeology (London, 1975).
103. Mark Bowden, Pitt Rivers: The life and archaeological work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA (Cambridge, 1991).
104. For example: Morton Wheeler, Alms for oblivion: An antiquary's scrapbook (London, 1966), chap. 5;
105. and Hudson, Social history of archaeology (ref. 42), 96-97. Hudson emphasizes what was lost in the transition from antiquarianism to scientific archaeology.
106. Daniel, A hundred years (ref. 42), chaps. 6-9;
107. and Glyn Daniel and Colin Refrew, The idea of prehistory (Edinburgh, 1988).
108. For example: William M. Flinders Petrie, Methods and aims in archaeology (London, 1904; repr. New York, 1972);
109. idem, Seventy years in archaeology (New York, 1932);
110. Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the earth (Oxford, 1954);
111. idem. Alms for oblivion (ref. 45);
112. Stuart Piggott, Approach to archaeology (Cambridge, MA, 1959);
113. and Sigfried J. De Laet, Archaeology and its problems (London, 1957). Few of the many popular accounts of celebrated digs pay much heed to field practice.
114. On natural and man-made substances in chemistry, see Ursula Klein, Experiments, models, paper tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century (Stanford, 2003).
115. Robert E. Kohler, "Place and practice in field biology", History of science, xl (2002), 189-210;
116. and idem, Landscapes and labscapes (ref. 1), esp. chaps. 7, 8.
117. On place generally see Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, "The place of knowledge: A methodological survey", Science in context, iv (1991), 3-21;
118. and Thomas F. Gieryn, "A space for place in sociology", Annual review of sociology, xxvi (2000), 453-96.
119. On "practices of place" see Kohler, Landscapes and labscapes (ref. 1).
120. Studies that deal with scientific collecting on the imperial fringe include Lucille H. Brockway, Science and colonial expansion: The role of the British royal botanic gardens (New York, 1979; repr. New Haven, 2002);
121. Fa-Ti Fan, "Victorian naturalists in China: Science and informal empire", The British journal of the history of science, xxxvi (2003), 1-26;
122. idem, British naturalists in Qing China: Science, empire, and cultural encounter (Cambridge, MA, 2004);
123. David P. Miller, "Joseph Banks, empire, and 'centers of calculation' in late Hanoverian London", in Visions of empire: Voyages, botany, and representations of Nature, ed. by Miller and Peter Hanns Riell (Cambridge, 1996), 21-37;
124. David Mackay, "Agents of empire: The Banksian collectors and evaluation of new lands", ibid., 38-57;
125. and Jane Camerini, "Wallace in the field", Osiris, n.s., xi (1996), 44-65.
126. Steven Shapin, "The invisible technician", American scientist, lxxvii (1989), 554-63.
127. Kohler, All creatures (ref. 12), chap. 5.
128. Gräslund, Birth of prehistoric chronology (ref. 43), chap. 4.
129. Ibid., chaps. 12-14.
130. For example, Oscar Montelius later insisted that his Bronze-Age classification derived from Darwinian theory, though his publications reveal that it must have originated in sorting burial objects, ibid., 116. Theory was of course more prestigious.
131. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Über Naturwissenschaft im allgemeinen einzelne Betrachtungen und Aphorismen", paragraph 110, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe Sämtliche Werke, xxv (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 113.
132. Ernest Gellner, Nations and nationalism (Ithaca, NY, 1983), 139, "Perhaps", he added, "we can only describe things well when we have already understood them".
133. For a similar moral economy see Steven Shapin, "The house of experiment", Isis, lxxix (1988), 373-404;
134. also Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the fly: Drosophila genetics and the experimental life (Chicago, 1994), chaps. 4-5.
135. There is a large literature on common-property regimens, but exemplary historical case studies are Robert M. Netting, Balancing on an alp: Ecological change and continuity in a Swiss mountain community (New York, 1981);
136. and Margaret A. McKean, "Management of traditional common lands (lriachi) in Japan", in Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management (Washington, DC, 1986), 533-89.
137. For example: De Laet, Archaeology and its problems (ref. 47), De Laet writes of the communal imperative to publish prompt and full descriptions of sites and objects.
138. On the "naturalization" of lab practices, see Graeme Gooday, "'Nature' in the laboratory: Domestication and discipline with the microscope in Victorian life science", The British journal for the history of science, xxiv (1991), 307-41;
139. and Robert E. Kohler, "Labscapes: Naturalizing the laboratory", History of science, xl (2002), 473-501.